How to use App Tracking transparency on iPhone and iPad?

App Tracking Transparency lets you decide whether or not apps should be able to track your activity. Here’s how to use it.

Apple has implemented a feature called App Tracking Transparency to iOS 14.5. (ATT). But what is it, exactly? App Tracking Transparency allows you to choose which apps are permitted to follow your behaviour across apps and websites from different firms. After you enable the functionality on your iPhone or iPad running iOS 14.5 or later, applications must question users for permission to track their behaviour.

If you’re still not sure how this monitoring technology works, consider all the times you’ve been looking for a certain product that you only needed to buy once. You may or may not have purchased the item, but you are now being assaulted with adverts for identical things on Facebook and Instagram. Does this ring a bell? Because firms like Facebook collect user data like browser history in order to give “tailored” adverts and other services, this is the case. While this may appear to be OK at first, after viewing what appears to be the 50th advertising for a toilet bowl cleaning, it becomes tiresome.

How to enable App Tracking Transparency

By default, App Tracking Transparency should be on for everyone once the iPhone or iPad is updated to at least iOS 14.5 or later, like iOS 15. But if you want to make sure that it is enabled, or if you want to turn it off, here’s how.

1. Launch Settings on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Scroll down and tap Privacy.
3. Tap Tracking.
4. Check to make sure that the toggle for Allow Apps to Request to Track is ON (green). If you want to turn it off, just tap the toggle until it’s grayed out.

When you enable App Tracking Transparency, applications that have followed Apple’s new standards will display a prompt the next time you start them. This popup will ask for your permission to monitor your activity throughout the app as well as the company’s other applications and websites, and you can choose whether or not to enable it or request that the app not track your behaviour.

Under the Tracking section of Privacy, all of the applications that have sought for permission to track you will show.

How to Allow an App to track if you rejected previously

If you previously did not allow an app to track your information, or you did, but now you’ve changed your mind, you can toggle it for individual apps as you see fit.

1. Launch Settings on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Scroll down and tap Privacy.
3. Tap Tracking.
4. Tap the toggle next to the apps that you want to allow tracking or not.

Keep your browsing history private with App Tracking Transparency

Apple has long taken a strong position on customer privacy, as seen by its privacy website. App Tracking Transparency is just another weapon in the toolbox for protecting our data from marketers and firms like Facebook, and it appears to be having a significant impact. If you don’t want Big Brother to know you’re shopping for common home products and other stuff, make sure it’s turned on.